The Ultimate Guide to Writing a Research Paper (11 Steps)
As you advance your academic path, research paper becomes an everyday part of it.
But the whole task seems daunting if it's your first time doing a research paper. After all, a research paper is not a short-term project or an easy assignment. It requires long hours and hard work to be fine!
Thankfully, there are correct approaches to writing a research paper.
Research paper writing services are there for your rescue, but still, they can help you to an extent.
This is the ultimate guide to writing a research paper. Here we will mention tips for writing a research paper.
What Is a Research Paper?
A research paper is an academic writing piece that provides analysis, interpretation, and argument based on in-depth research. The topic of research varies on the subject and cases, and each of these papers offers in-depth information and objectives to the readers.
We can compare research papers to academic essays, but they are longer and more detailed, designed to assess your writing and scholarly research skills.
Just like you can reach out to a website that writes essays for you, there are a handful of guides helping you with your research paper.
Our guide is similar!
How to Write a Research Paper?
We've prepared this step-by-step guide to walk you through the entire process of creating a research paper. Here we will cover every aspect of writing, from understanding your assignment to proofreading your final draft.
Step 1: Understand Your Assignment
Each research paper is designed to serve a specific purpose.
Before getting started with anything, you first need to understand the assignment.
What are the specific tasks set out for this? What information would work best for it?
Here are a few suggestions to understand your assignment:
- Read the instructions carefully, and clear out the confusion with your professor
- Identify the goal, need, deadline, specification, and formatting of the assignment
- Create a list of the key points, and check them through when compelling your research into your writing
Understanding your assignment will require you to be realistic and decide the time for preparing the research by keeping the time frame, word count, writing, and editing into consideration.
Step 2: Choose a Topic
Depending upon your assignment needs, you can come up with plenty of ideas for your research paper.
You can brainstorm ideas with pen and paper or contact your fellow students or professor.
One method we suggest is considering a broad topic and writing continuously for two to three minutes to identify anything relevant that would be interesting to research.
The other idea is to gain inspiration. The Internet is full of ideas for you.
You don't have to move forward with a broader topic! Research on a narrow topic provides more valuable insight and correct information.
For example, research on World War I is a broad topic, but research on the alliance between Austria and Hungary in World War I is narrow.
So, to begin with, you can have a broad subject area and later narrow it down to select a topic that interests you the most.
Step 3: Perform Preliminary Research
Note down every tiny detail that seems important to your topic. The best part of your research is finding an issue to focus on.
You can explore various articles, books, examples of research papers, and reliable websites to ensure you get everything important.
When doing a research paper, we suggest stating facts rather than verifying ideas in your mind.
Ask these questions to yourself:
- Are there any key points missing in the research on similar topics?
- What are the areas on the topic you can broadly discuss?
- How does your research stand out?
- Is there already recent research on the same topic?
Research becomes resourceful and exciting when you question yourself.
Step 4: Craft a Thesis Statement
A thesis statement is a central argument that develops the purpose of what your research paper will be all about.
If you ever start your search based on a question, the thesis should be the answer to that particular question.
Developing a thesis is collecting evidence and reasoning to support your answer.
A thesis must be concise, contentious, and coherent. It should briefly summarize the argument in a sentence or two, make a claim requiring further evidence or analysis, and have a point that relates to every part of the paper.
As you proceed with the research paper, you might need to revise and refine your thesis statement, but in the beginning, it serves as a writing guide.
We suggest writing every paragraph aiming to support the development of the central claim.
Step 5: Create an Outline
An outline is a must when writing a research paper. In your outline, you should list key topics, the arguments, and evidence you would like to include and divide them into sections and headings.
Further, in the writing process, you take an outline as a reference, so make sure it includes all the important aspects of your research.
A structured outline helps make the writing process simpler and more efficient. Therefore, it is worth spending some time creating a solid outline.
Step 6: Write the First Draft of the Research Paper
You need to understand that the first draft of your research paper could be better, and it will require a bit of refining.
But these suggestions could be helpful:
- Write the thesis now, then think of perfecting it later
- Pay attention to clearly organizing the content in logical orders of paragraphs and sentences to help in your second draft
- Make sure to express your ideas as clearly as possible
You don't have to start your research paper with an introduction. Instead, you could start with the most exciting part of something you know well. It's somewhere you need to start. Further, your outline will be there to use as a map.
What we suggest is keeping large sections of text the same. There are always sections where it might come to use.
To present all your content clearly, use a short paragraph of around 4-5 sentences.
Step 7: Write an Introduction
When writing an introduction for your research paper, make sure it includes three questions: What, why, and how?
After reading the introduction, the reader should know what your paper will be about, why it is worth it and how you'll build your arguments.
- What? Align the question to the paper's topic, the introduction, background, and key terms.
- Why? Here, you address why your research paper is worth reading. Make sure to address the issues you've included in your research in the why part.
- How? Let your readers know how they can benefit from it and what's expected to be mentioned in your research paper.
Step 8: Write a compelling body of text
One major problem in research appears is organizing the order of the crotamiton and presenting it in the paper.
For this purpose, we suggest creating an outline in the first place.
Therefore, keeping yourself on track ensures you align your content per the outline.
A few ways to create a compelling body are:
- Check if the topic sentence is against the thesis statement
- If the topic sentences are against each other
If two of your paragraphs say the same thing, updating it in a single paragraph is better.
Your research paper should be insightful and informative rather than repetitive.
Step 9: Write the Conclusion
A research paper is designed in the first place to help the reader out in the argument.
A proper research paper summary provides an overview, reasoning, and a final verdict. In the end, your writing should have some points to argue about.
Review the outline and include a bit of all in your conclusion.
Step 10: Create Your Second Draft
Now comes the part where you have an introduction, body of paragraphs, and conclusion to a research writing. Now is when you create your second draft.
Make sure to check the following things in your second draft:
- Check how your content has changed from the first draft to the second draft
- Were you able to cover everything from your outline
- Is there any rearrangement of ideas necessary to do?
- Are all the headings and paragraphs adding sense to the writing?
- How well has the topic been covered?
If your second draft can answer all these questions, it's in a place to almost get refined.
Step 11: Proofread the Research Paper
This could also be a revision.
Here, you proofread your writing to ensure you have completed all the necessary elements, statements, facts, and paragraphs.
Confirm that your writing aligns with the assigned tasks and that everything is okay, from spelling to grammar to facts and figures.
Next, check the sentence structure, and the formatting, if you're using unnecessary words, and if the paragraph doesn't flow accurately in the content.
If you find any mistakes, now is the time to make changes.
Submit your Research Paper
Now that you've gone through a detailed step to create a compelling academic research paper.
Present it to everyone.
What's important to note is the due date and necessity of the research paper, and ensure that you've everything in place so that you don't have to rush at the last minute to make the changes.
We designed this article to help with the research paper.
